We've rebuilt our website, and there's a robot now

The honest reason is that our old site was selling a business we no longer run. It advertised a £199 setup fee, then £49 a month, and it talked about you owning the site outright at the end. We've since changed the offering completely. There's no setup fee now, prices start at £20 a month, and we own and maintain the build while your content, your domain and your brand stay yours.

A website describing a version of your business that doesn't exist anymore isn't just untidy. It's actively costing you. Every enquiry we got started with us correcting something on our own site, which is a terrible way to open a conversation and a worse way to build trust. If your site says one thing and you say another, people don't assume the site's out of date. They assume you're being cagey.

There's a second reason, and it's less comfortable. We build websites for a living. Ours is the first thing anyone judges us on, and it had drifted into being the oldest thing we'd made. That's a bit like a decorator with a peeling front door.

The old model asked for a few hundred pounds before anything happened. That lump sum was, by a distance, the single biggest thing stopping small businesses from getting a decent site. People weren't refusing to spend money. They were refusing to spend it before they'd seen anything.

So we removed it. There's no setup fee at all now, and no contract. Plans start at £20 a month for a single, properly designed page, £50 for a multi-page site for a growing business, £100 if you want to edit content yourself, and £200 for the lot with same-day support. Everything is on the pricing page in plain numbers, and you can cancel any time.

Payment is by Direct Debit rather than card, which sounds like a boring detail and genuinely isn't. Cards expire and payments fail at the worst moment. Direct Debit doesn't, it adjusts on its own if you add or drop something, you always get notice of exactly what's leaving your account, and it's covered by the Direct Debit Guarantee. Your first payment only starts once you're happy with the finished site.

We've written before about why we charge monthly instead of thousands up front, and the new site is simply that argument made properly rather than buried three pages deep.

The part of the rebuild we're most pleased with isn't visual. It's that the site now leads with the thing that actually helps people choose: we design a prototype of your homepage first, usually within about three working days, and you see it before you commit to anything or pay a penny. No brief to write, nothing to risk. If it isn't right, you've lost an afternoon of waiting and nothing else.

That's on the front page now instead of hidden in a process diagram. We've also given real space to our work, because a small business owner deciding on a web designer wants to see finished sites far more than they want to read adjectives about craft.

And we added a set of comparison pages putting us next to Squarespace, WordPress, GoDaddy, AI builders and just running a Facebook page. Not to rubbish any of them, because for some businesses those genuinely are the right answer. We wrote them so you can rule us out quickly if we're not a fit. That sounds like odd marketing until you've sat through enough calls that were never going anywhere.

The other structural change was being straight about scope. A website looks like one job and is really about a dozen, and most of them only become visible when they go wrong. The new site lays all six of them out: design and build, hosting, your domain and business email, SEO and being readable to AI search, updates and upkeep, and actual UK support from people who know your site.

The point isn't the list. Anyone can write a list. The point is that all of it sits inside one monthly payment, so there's no scenario where your site goes down and a separate hosting invoice turns up, or where a security update becomes a quote. You can see the whole thing on how it works.

Underneath, the site got the same treatment we'd give a client's. It's fast, it's built to be understood by both Google and AI assistants, and it now follows your device's light or dark setting instead of blasting you with white at eleven at night. None of that is showing off. It's just what we'd do for you, done to ourselves so you can check we mean it.

Now the robot. He's called Builder Bot, and he's the reason a fair few people will remember our site at all.

You'll meet him first in the hero, floating about while the page loads. After that he turns up doing a job rather than just decorating. He's sat cross-legged and meditating next to the list of things we handle, because that's the feeling we're selling: it's all taken care of, you can relax. He's wearing a headset on the book a call page. He's peering at figures on the ROI calculator. He celebrates when you finish an order. And when you hit a page that doesn't exist, he turns up with a bandage round his head, having gone to fetch it and come back worse for wear.

That last one is the best argument for having him at all. A 404 page is a dead end and a small moment of irritation. A robot with a bandage on turns it into a joke, and people forgive a joke.

Web design is a crowded, oddly faceless industry. Scroll through a dozen studio sites and you'll get the same stock photography, the same gradient, the same three words about passion and craft. There's very little to hold onto, so people default to price, and competing on price alone is a race nobody enjoys winning.

A character solves that cheaply. Builder Bot isn't clever branding strategy, he's a face you recognise a week later. He also lets us set a tone we could never manage in prose. We're a small outfit that does careful work and doesn't take itself desperately seriously, and one robot communicates that faster than a paragraph claiming it.

We should be honest that this isn't right for everyone. A solicitor, an accountant or a funeral director probably shouldn't have a cartoon robot on the homepage, and we'd talk you out of it. But that's the real point, and it applies to your site as much as ours. Character is a choice somebody has to make deliberately. A template can't make it for you, and neither can an AI builder, because neither of them knows what you're like. It's the bit of a website that has to come from an actual person paying attention to your business.

Everything on the new site is the same work we'd do for you. Same care over the design, same speed, same setup for getting found, same attention to the small moments like a 404 page. If you like how ours reads and behaves, that's the most useful thing you can know about working with us.

If you want to see what we'd do with yours, we'll rebuild your current homepage as a real, working prototype and send you a link in about three working days. No card, no commitment, no brief to write. Open it on your phone, hold it next to what you've got now, and decide from there. If it's not for you, keep the screenshot and owe us nothing. You can start from the website design page.

Builder Bot will be waiting at the bottom of the page either way. He gets a bit excited about new projects.